Los Angeles, June 17: Zoinks!! "Scooby-Doo" was no dog at the North American box office.
In one of the biggest surprises of a red-hot summer movie season, the feature version of the vintage cartoon TV series bow-wowed at No. 1 with a $56.4 million weekend haul, according to studio estimates issued on Sunday. The producers of the Warner Bros. release said they would have been happy with an opening in the mid-$30 million range.
"Scooby-Doo" ranks as the biggest June opener in history, surpassing the three-year-old record of "Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me" ($54.9 million). It is also the third biggest opening of 2002, behind "Spider-Man" ($114.8 million) and "Star Wars: Episode II: Attack of the Clones" ($80 million).
The film, headlined by Freddie Prinze, Jr., his fiancee Sarah Michelle Gellar and Matthew Lillard, cost about $80 million to make, with a quarter of that spent on the computer-animated titular pooch.
The Ben Affleck nuclear thriller "The Sum of All Fears" (Paramount), which had ruled the box office the last two weekends, slipped to No. 4 with $13.5 million for the Friday-to-Sunday period. Its 17-day total is $84.5 million.
Bureau Report
